RSS

How-To Geek

Note: This article is part of our archive and is likely out of date.
(Links may not work, downloads have not been recently tested for safety)

Ideas come to us at unexpected times, and we don’t always have enough time to take action on all of them at once. Thankfully Microsoft OneNote is a great tool to keep track of ideas for anything.

Microsoft has made various features in OneNote to file our ideas, scribble notes with keyboard or inking devices such as a mouse, and backing up our notes into the web, making it the ideal tool for the job.

Filing Ideas into One Note

OneNote allows you to toss ideas onto a page in an unstructured way. You can go back later and add the structure you want or completely rearrange the notes in a different order. It’s a great way to take notes. One note arrange your ideas into folders that I use to file my ideas into two separate folders:

a general folder where I put any ideas that comes into my mind at different point of times so that I can review them on a later time and develop them into an actual article.

article folder where I put specific ideas to a particular article that I am working on.

Scribbling Ideas into OneNote

OneNote is a great companion when researching and collecting information from the internet that often involves browsing numerous web pages. Microsoft has enhanced a number of features in one note to improve our note taking from various web pages by allowing us to docked one note when we move it along side other windows (for example a web browser)

While in docked mode, OneNote 2010 can automatically link the notes you take to what you’re looking at — such as a Web page address in your Internet Explorer.

Microsoft OneNote is tightly integrated with Windows Live that makes it easier for us to access our notes virtually anywhere as long as we have a working internet connection.

We can synchronize our notes in different machines allowing us to work on our ideas on different PC without having to manually merge different ideas into our master note.

Microsoft has even made OneNote available for us to use on the web making it easier for us to work on our notes on PC that does not have OneNote installed.

Conclusion

Microsof OneNote is a great tool to take down notes and develop ideas. Microsoft has even integrated OneNote with Window 7 mobile phones allowing us to take down notes and ideas virtually anywhere with our mobile phone.

Comments (5)

@Cordell, we have not used open office much in our writing process, but I can say that we’re keen to see whether we can achieve a similar thing with open office. we will do some research into open office and we’ll publish an article around keeping track of notes/ideas with open office =)

DID YOU KNOW?

The word “shoddy”, used to refer to something of poor construction or quality, dates back to the U.S. Civil War wherein “shoddy” was a type of cheap and inferior fabric that was the byproduct of wool processing and sometimes used for military uniforms. A shoddy-fabric uniform was of much lower quality than a proper wool garment.